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  Metzinger had hinted. But were those concessions too much to expect? Hardly, from a government which had always regarded oil as the worst economic weapon to be used against it. With whom could an agreement be attempted? Saudi Arabia, he supposed. That was the country with the biggest reserves. And although there was an occasional rumour, the ruling family appeared more stable than some of the other governments in the area. He had been right in stressing to Metzinger the dangers of an unsupported approach; it showed the proper business prudence from the head of a company with their responsibilities. He could justifiably and provably present himself to the Middle East as a businessman, nothing more. And as such return – hopefully with an indication of an agreement – to open talks with Pretoria.

  It certainly justified another intelligence assessment from Geoffrey Wall. A further thought came to him. Only he could do it, in the early stages at least. So it would be personal involvement again.

  ‘What we have been talking about is not for general discussion,’ warned Metzinger.

  ‘I understand,’ said Collington. Metzinger was proud of his government connections, he thought. He wished he could identify them.

  ‘I think it’s time we joined the women,’ said Metzinger, reminded of his new responsibilities.

  When they entered the drawing-room, Collington saw Hannah had prepared the card table for bridge. They played for an hour, Collington partnering Janet. She played determinedly, openly correcting him when she considered he had made a mistake. By the end, they had won twenty rand.

  It was Janet who suggested they should go and Metzinger immediately agreed. At the door Collington realised that Janet was still expecting nothing more than a handshake, to which she responded with dry-palmed firmness.

  ‘Quite a woman,’ judged Collington, as he and Hannah returned to the cardroom.

  ‘I’ve never seen Daddy like it,’ she agreed. ‘If she said bark, I’m sure he’d do it.’

  ‘I thought it was a successful evening.’

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘I enjoyed it.’

  ‘This is all a bit unreal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘If you need me to say it, then I will. I want you back. I want you back right now which means I don’t want you to leave for that stupid apartment tonight.’ The offer burst from her, in a gush of words. And then she came to him, expecting him to hold her, tensing slightly at his obvious hesitation. He felt her body against his, her breasts pressing into him and the hard pubic mound, and there was none of the difficulty he had known in Rome with Ann. He pushed her away, an act of refusal, leading her to a chair and sitting her down.

  ‘I’ve got something to say first.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  He crouched at her feet, his hands cupped around her face. ‘I love you, Hannah,’ he said. ‘I’ve come as near as I ever want to fucking everything up and now I’m going to put it right. But it’s got to be the proper way.’

  Her eyes had misted but now she blinked against the tears. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘I have let things become confused,’ said Collington, admitting it to himself as well as Hannah for the first time. ‘I’m sitting on top of everything, like one of those carved figureheads they used to put on sailing boats. And with about as much practical use. I was bored and irritated and instead of recognising why, I imagined it was with our marriage, which it never was. And so I was stupid.’

  He hesitated, at the moment of complete admission. She deserved the complete honesty after what he had done, but he was apprehensive about causing any more hurt.

  ‘There was another woman, in London,’ he hurried on, unable to look at her. ‘She’s worked for the company for a long time – Jenkins’ personal assistant – and I’d known her socially and I was there, lonely and bored.’

  ‘You don’t have to make it sound like a rather bad film script,’ she said, pulling away from him, rigid-faced.

  ‘It was rather like a bad film,’ he said. ‘I behaved like a shit to her and like a shit to you. Which is why I’m not staying with you tonight, although I want to. I’m not coming back until I’ve been as honest with her as I have with you. And when I’ve done that I want to come back.’

  ‘Bastard!’ she said, in sudden vehemence.

  He had expected tears, certainly, and then the forgiveness she’d promised. The different reaction startled him.

  ‘It’s been a game, hasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some stupid, male menopausal game. And you’ve caused Christ knows what damage to our son, buggered up some poor bitch in London and made me hate you … You’re a bastard.’

  It was becoming the disaster it had been in Rome, thought Collington. ‘Is that what you do, hate me?’ he said, wanting her to say she didn’t and bring the mood around to forgiveness.

  She gestured him away impatiently, turning her head into the corner of the chair. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ she said. ‘Except that I don’t want you near me.’

  He scrambled to his feet, feeling self-conscious and stupid. ‘I couldn’t even explain it well, could I?’

  ‘I don’t think it was anything to explain well,’ she said. ‘And I don’t like the self-pity, James. It doesn’t become you.’

  ‘I meant what I said. About wanting to come back.’ He held out his hands in the first pleading gesture he could ever remember in his life. ‘Please!’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ she said, as if in some private conversation with herself, ‘I never suspected it … I never thought you were screwing around …’

  ‘I wasn’t screwing around!’

  ‘Then what the hell was it?’

  It hadn’t been like that, Collington thought. But there would never be a way he could convince Hannah. Nor Ann, either.

  ‘You don’t want to understand,’ he said.

  ‘Get out,’ she said. She began to cry, her shoulders pumping with emotion. ‘Christ! I even invited you to sleep with me, like some whore.’

  ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve taken everything I’ve said and turned it upside down.’

  ‘Go away, James. Leave me alone.’

  He strode away from the house, leaving doors swung wide open behind him. He took the driveway in the same anger, turning wide so that the car slid on the gravel, and he felt the shudder of the wing as it bounced off the gatepost. He’d tried a lie and it hadn’t worked and he’d tried honesty and that hadn’t worked either. He wanted Hannah, who didn’t want him. And he didn’t want Ann. Who did.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Collington, speaking aloud to himself in the car. ‘What a fuck-up!’

  It was after midnight when he got back to the penthouse, and had his thoughts been under their usual control he might not have called Geoffrey Wall so late. But despite the distraction of the episode with Hannah, he couldn’t clear his mind completely of what Metzinger had said. Wall answered on the second ring, as alert and bright as always. There wasn’t any irritation in his voice, either at the lateness or the request.

  ‘It won’t work,’ warned Wall. ‘There are regulations, rules …’

  ‘I’m not particularly concerned about rules,’ said Collington, parrotting what Metzinger had said. Perhaps he should have been: there was probably a rule against admitting unsuspected adultery to a wife at the moment she invited you back.

  ‘What if it’s impossible?’

  ‘Your brief is to make it possible,’ reminded Collington. He sounded like a parody of a multi-national executive – film dialogue again.

  There was a momentary pause from the other end of the telephone. Then Wall said, ‘How much time do I have?’

  ‘Three days, maximum,’ said Collington. ‘Tomorrow, if possible.’

  ‘We’d need an edge,’ said Wall. ‘A lever.’

  ‘Find one.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Geoffrey Wall had the Middle East assessments on Collington’s desk by the middle of the following afternoon: a deliberately impressiv
e performance.

  ‘You said today, if possible,’ he reminded Collington, just unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice.

  Collington nodded across the desk, emphasising his gratitude.

  Wall was almost a caricature of the rising American business executive, neatly barbered, Ivy-league suited; even the shirt was button down. Collington knew the performance was not quite as dramatic as the man was making it, because the intelligence unit maintained comprehensive records, but it would have been picky to show his awareness. He looked at the desk clock, establishing a time limit for himself.

  ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have a conference.’

  Collington’s middle-of-the-night instructions had been quite explicit, demanding an across-the-board examination, and so Wall had covered all the main oil producers. Only Iran had been excluded, because of its unpredictability. Collington started on the smaller suppliers, like Oman and Bahrain moving up to Kuwait and Iraq and the Arab Emirates of the gulf. A linking theme began to emerge early, which was why he left Saudi Arabia until last. It was the biggest producer and would therefore be affected more than most by the weakness which Collington detected.

  He was tempted to hurry through the file, seeking confirmation of what he wanted, but he suppressed the eagerness. Attention to detail had always been the key to success and it would be here, if he were to translate Metzinger’s suggestion to some practical benefit.

  Collington was a man accustomed to dealing with cosmic sums of money, but even he was surprised at Wall’s estimate that the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority had £35,000,000,000 invested abroad. The figure was included in the facts-at-a-glance synopsis at the beginning of the file, so Collington flicked through until he found a more comprehensive budgetary analysis, because it was important for what he had in mind. Predictably, Wall hadn’t made a mistake.

  Collington went back to the beginning, noting the Saudi output at 9,500,000 barrels a day and agreeing the formula by which Wall had computed the income. Because of the price fluctuations, Wall had used a mean average, over three years, to assess the annual revenue. On a figure of twenty-six dollars a barrel for light crude, it put the yearly income at around £30,000,000,000. Yet even with these colossal earnings, the Saudis were running a budget deficit, largely because of the cost of the capital goods they imported and the massive development plans for the country. There had been a suspension of some of the work, but Collington saw that for the five-year period from 1980, the Saudi government had pledged themselves to spend £134,000,000,000.

  The investment pattern came half-way through the file and Collington smiled as he came to it, tapping against the table edge the gold pencil he’d taken to make margin notes.

  Until the Saudis had withdrawn control for themselves, their oil business had been run by the Arabian America Oil Company, which Collington supposed made understandable the decision to retain their monetary links with America. It was easy to be wise in hindsight as Collington was being, but in the beginning it would have been difficult for any financial counsellor to anticipate the danger of what had happened.

  Of the £35,000,000,000 invested, more than half was in dollar holdings, in American banks and American investments: even direct bank holdings were denominated in dollars. Certainly in the last few months, since what he now knew to be the gold-for-wheat deal between the United States and the Soviet Union and the resulting gold sales, the dollar had strengthened. So it was proving a good investment for the Saudi Arabians.

  But Wall had taken the figures sufficiently far back to provide a comparison. For more than a year before the resumption of the American gold sales, Saudi Arabia had been trapped in a ridiculous financial position. And trapped was the right word, Collington decided. They had been locked into a weak, falling currency, but to have attempted to shift such vast sums away from dollars and convert them to maybe marks or yen would have depressed the dollar even further and worsened a position from which he was convinced they would have wanted to escape.

  It was a monstrous cleft-stick situation and Collington would have bet a year’s income that the Saudi financiers were desperate for a way out. A gold offer, bypassing the uncertainty of paper currency, would seem very attractive to a nation which inherently trusted metal anyway.

  Collington thrust back in his chair, sighing. It was a bargaining position, certainly. But it still didn’t provide the lever that Geoffrey Wall had recognised as being necessary the previous night. Perhaps Metzinger’s idea wasn’t viable after all.

  Wall’s knock came precisely after two hours and Collington gestured him to a chair. The American perched on its edge, his body tensed forward, like a gun dog awaiting the order to go and fetch.

  ‘What’s the weakness?’ demanded Collington, with a sweep of his hand encompassing everything that Wall had prepared.

  ‘No secret about that,’ said Wall at once. ‘They’re all locked into dollars. It’s not so bad at the moment, but in the past it’s cost them millions.’

  Collington tilted back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. ‘If you were a Middle East producer and someone came to you and offered gold instead of a paper exchange, what would you do?’

  ‘Want to accept it,’ said Wall.

  ‘Want to?’ queried Collington, isolating the reservation.

  ‘It would be difficult from here,’ said Wall. ‘The oil embargo has been pretty flaky in the past. What you’re suggesting, I think, is something new. Very new and very big. Since Iran, the Muslims have been feeling their power. I can’t see any Middle East country risking the internal upheaval that would be caused if it became known that a deal had been made with South Africa. Better to lose millions than a throne, surely?’

  Collington nodded at the political assessment; ‘Unless there were a lever,’ he said, using Wall’s word.

  ‘Which I might have.’

  Collington sat up straight, staring across at the younger man. If Wall had found a way he should have announced it at once, instead of allowing the preliminary hypothesis. The man was trying to show how clever he was; worse, he had imposed some sort of test upon Collington, trying to gauge his ability. Collington looked for self-confidence in his senior executives but hoped that Wall wasn’t going to over-reach himself.

  ‘Then why haven’t I got it?’ Collington asked, showing his annoyance.

  Wall blinked, taking the rebuke. ‘I thought you wanted a general discussion first,’ he said, in bad recovery.

  ‘What is it?’ said Collington, maintaining the edge to his voice.

  ‘Prince Tewfik Hassan,’ declared Wall. He’d prepared his presentation and refused to be deflected by Collington’s irritation.

  The composition of the Saudi government had been listed on the second sheet of the file Collington had read earlier. ‘Minister for Oil and Development,’ he identified.

  ‘And the man confidently expected one day to get the throne.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He was involved in the attempt to corner the silver market, with that Texan named Bains. Difficult to be absolutely accurate, but the guess is that he lost about £100,000,000.’

  Collington smiled broadly, his anger at the other man evaporating. ‘Now there’s a thing!’ he said. He leaned further forward across the desk. ‘What’s the full background?’

  Wall took a photograph from the document case at his side, sliding it across to Collington. Hassan was pictured wearing the white robes which indicated he was a pilgrim who had worshipped at Mecca. He was staring, dark-eyed and unsmiling into the camera, a thin-faced, goatee-bearded man.

  ‘Educated in Islamic and civil law at King Fuad University in Cairo,’ recited Wall. ‘Then quite a run around America. Law at New York University and Harvard Law School and then …’ Wall looked up, smiling. ‘And at this point he seems to have developed a negotiating technique, during a year studying psychiatry at Columbia University …’

  ‘Strange switch,’ said Collington.

  Wall
nodded. ‘Not many friends, according to our divisions in New York and London. Parties a lot when he’s in the West: Regine’s, Annabel’s, that sort of thing. Likes first nights, particularly Broadway. Described by those who’ve been up against him as a hard negotiator. Married for eight years to a wife named Leila. Two children, both being educated locally but scheduled for English prep schools, when they’re old enough

  ‘How did the silver thing come about?’

  ‘Unclear,’ admitted Wall. ‘Best guess is that he retained an association with Bains from Harvard. They were there together and there are reports of a friendship.’

  ‘I wonder if it still exists.’

  ‘Wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t think he’s equipping himself to be ruler. Sounds more like a playboy.’

  Wall shook his head. ‘I think that’s misleading. He’s as hard as hell, like I said. And the partying isn’t too serious; certainly it’s a secret well kept from Riyadh or Jeddah, so it doesn’t matter. The money loss is more important. It’s the first business mistake he’s made. And it’s a bad one. If he’s going to foul up like that, so the criticism goes, what the hell’s going to happen when he gets control over the whole pot?’

  ‘What’s the commission protocol?’ demanded Collington, ahead of the other man.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ said Wall. ‘One of the biggest concerns in the government is the tendency towards corruption.’

  ‘If Hassan could come in with a deal that lifted the Saudis from the uncertainty of currency fluctuation and at the same time recovered the £100,000,000, he’d have made a complete recovery, wouldn’t he?’ mused Collington. ‘He’d have proved his ability to be king.’

  ‘It would be a neat twist, if you could make it work.’

  Collington thrust up from the table, the decision settling in his mind. ‘It’s worth a trip to Riyadh,’ he said.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Wall.

  Collington had twisted towards the picture window, with its view of Pretoria. He turned back, waiting.